Three Ways to Validate the Impact of IT Change on End User Experience with SteelCentral Aternity

Digital transformation is in full swing in the enterprise, increasing the pressure on IT for End User Experience Monitoring. Migration to the cloud. SaaS for business critical apps. Mobility initiatives to increase customer satisfaction, revenue, and workforce productivity. IT requires visibility into end user experience to ensure these strategic initiatives deliver the expected gains. The same goes for more routine changes like upgrades to applications, infrastructure, or devices. Riverbed’s acquisition of Aternity provides Level 3 application and network experts with world-class end user experience monitoring capabilities to validate the impact of IT change.

End user experience monitoring at the point of consumption

Unlike other approaches to End User Experience Monitoring, SteelCentral Aternity monitors IT from the point of consumption—the end user’s device. Whether that device is a physical device like a PC or laptop, a virtual device like a Citrix server, or a mobile device, SteelCentral Aternity monitors users’ experience as applications render on the screens of their devices. Learn more about how this approach to End User Experience Monitoring differs from others here.

Business activity analytics to validate the impact of IT change

The benefits of migrating to the cloud, deploying apps on tablets, upgrading the network infrastructure, or moving to a new application release won’t matter if end user experience is not at least as good, if not better, than before the change.

What counts is the response time that users see as they interact with applications in the context of a business workflow. With SteelCentral Aternity’s Business Activity Analytics, enterprises can define user interactions with any type of application in the context of a business workflow. These business-defined user interactions provide the context to validate the impact of IT change. You can learn more about how SteelCentral helps enterprises validate the impact of IT change by watching this short video:

SteelCentral Aternity helps you validate the impact of three types of IT change

SteelCentral Aternity enables Level 3 application and network experts to validate the impact of three types of change on end user experience – application changes, infrastructure changes, and migration between physical and virtual environments.

1. Application changes

SteelCentral Aternity enables Level 3 application owners or application support staff to analyze end user experience before and after application changes such as upgrades and patches. Here’s how it works using a SharePoint example.

The user selects the date of the change, the duration of the change, and the number of days to compare before and after the change (1). SteelCentral Aternity displays the overall response time of the monitored business activities, as seen by the end user (2) before and after the change, color-coded as to whether the response time improved, got worse, or stayed about the same. In this case, two business activities are slower, two are faster, and one is the same. It also displays the trend (3) in those business activities over the analysis window, and enables users to quantify the impact of the change by location, application server, or device type (4).

2. Infrastructure changes

With SteelCentral Aternity, Level 3 network experts can analyze the impact of infrastructure changes on end user experience. The user can analyze the impact of an infrastructure change at one particular location, such as implementing SteelHead for WAN optimization, or changes that impact the entire organization, such as upgrading datacenter infrastructure.

As above, the user selects the date and duration of the change, and the analysis window, and also chooses the application(s) to analyze (1). SteelCentral Aternity then displays the overall response time of the monitored applications, for all monitored business activities, as seen by the end user before and after the change (2). As above, it shows the trend (3) for each application, and enables users to quantify the impact of the change by location, application server, or device type (4).

3. VDI migrations

Desktop and application virtualization projects often get stalled because of user complaints about application performance after the initial migration, and the VDI team is frequently blamed. SteelCentral Aternity enables IT to break this logjam, by validating the impact of the VDI migration on end user experience.

The user specifies the timeframe to analyze, the application of interest, and whether all of the monitored activities are to be reviewed, or just some (1). SteelCentral then provides a side-by-side comparison of application performance, as seen by the end user, for business activities performed on physical and virtual desktops (2), as well as the trend over time (3). SteelCentral Aternity also shows the percentage of business activities meeting performance targets for both types of devices (4), and displays the data by a variety of factors, such as department, location, or app version (5). In this case, most BranchPortal business activities are faster on VDI and provide better SLA compliance.

More information on other SteelCentral Aternity end user experience monitoring use cases